SIEM Threat Detection: Solving SecOps Security Challenges
Few cybersecurity challenges are greater than those faced by lean SecOps teams. Limited cash flow makes the race between cost and customer acquisition exceedingly cut-throat, and the prospect of securing those assets is often low on the list of priorities. Unfortunately, putting your business out there attracts attention of all sorts – and where there’s cash flow, there are cybercriminals.
Groups of attackers now explicitly target mid and small organizations. A far cry from the flashy headlines of multi-million-dollar ransoms, the average ransomware attack now demands “just” $26,000 from its victim – making these teams the perfect target for cyber attackers that hit small, simple, and often.
This guide aims to establish the unique challenges that stand between these organizations and adequate cybersecurity and assess how Stellar’s Next-Gen SIEM solution can address them.
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Challenge #1: Lack of management support
There’s often an unspoken paradox within managers’ outlook on cybersecurity. On the one hand, senior management rely on the business’ size as protection, thinking they’re “too small” for attackers to be interested. This lingering mentality stems from the days when corporate networks were largely in-house and sectioned off from the wider Web.
Simultaneously, since the Covid-19 shutdowns that rocked the world in 2020, Organizations have overwhelmingly embraced the potential of online operations. Whether a remote employee base, online order fulfillment, or an increasingly diverse roster of revenue channels – more SMEs are online than ever before.
This reliance on the public internet means exposure to profiteering cybercriminals. But, even if the IT team wants change, there’s often a distinct lack of management support.
So, How Do You Build Support?
Building a culture of cyber resilience requires leadership to view cybersecurity teams and tools as an investment. Unfortunately, legacy cybersecurity tools can be a bottomless cost in terms of both time and labor – so a new approach is needed.
Firstly, a behavior change: it’s already fairly established that the more bad news cybersecurity analysts deliver to upper management, the less likely change is to occur – after all, if everything is high-urgency, nothing is. Pelting high-octane news stories at senior management can often bring a short ‘bounce’ to cybersecurity budgets, but this comes at the cost of long-term belief in a project, and is packaged with a heavy implication of ‘have you fixed this yet?’ in 6 months’ time. Instead, early cybersecurity projects need to clarify a long-term strategy that can improve cyber defense over years – hence, an investment mindset.
Alongside a soft change in attitude, a harder backbone of retooling is often necessary: it’s difficult to convince management of greater cybersecurity investment when there’s already a number of costly tools that are ineptly and inefficiently solving the problem. This is one of the main reasons why Stellar Cyber is replacing legacy SIEMs today – we offer a single, robust platform that covers every datapoint (more on how that works in a bit). Critically, Stellar’s automated reports indicate precisely what’s going on in your environment, and which incidents need the most attention. Generate comprehensive, high-level reports, and send them straight to managers’ inboxes – even on an automated schedule.
Challenge #2: Lean Cybersecurity Teams
Because they typically have fewer staff members, IT and security teams in small organizations need to act intelligently and efficiently. This makes the central tooling immensely important, as it needs to support this efficiency while making no compromise on SIEM threat detection and prevention.
Legacy SIEMs stand in direct opposition to lean cybersecurity teams’ operations. The technical ability for SIEM tools to analyze log data is great, but a lot of its genuine impact relies on the data it’s being fed. For instance, Windows systems don’t log all critical events by default – and some of the most important components like process and command line logging, PowerShell logs, and Windows Driver Framework logs tend to be disabled out of the box. Enabling these without proper tuning tends to flood legacy SIEMs with excessive data. Is that someone from sales working on a presentation, or an attacker snooping around for a database to exfiltrate? Enjoy spending the entire day finding out! Log collection, parsing, filtering, and analysis are traditionally nuanced and highly time-consuming – but it doesn’t need to be.
Stellar Cyber’s next-gen SIEM doesn’t just go for data source quantity – it also automates a lot of the normalization and analysis usually demanded by SIEM tools. This is performed by Interflow, our central analysis platform. All user, server, network, and service data (not just logs) is ingested, before the useless bits are discarded and relevant packet info is assessed according to its underlying architecture. If a PowerShell command is detected – rather than throw a barrage of alerts at you – Interflow checks the device it was running on, the action it resulted in, and the user that called it. By enriching this with Threat Intelligence – such as previous file downloads, market-leading threat intel, and an in-depth understanding of your users’ and devices’ behaviors – it can deliver real-time SIEM threat detection. This entire process is packaged into an actionable and searchable JSON record. Zoom out one step further, and analysts are able to search Interflow’s JSON records like Google, letting them snap to specific users, application types, and specific locations in a matter of seconds.
Cutting the noise and inefficiencies from SIEM tools makes Stellar the foundation for genuinely proactive security with real-time monitoring.
Challenge #3: Lack of Suitable License Structure
It’s all well and good having a market-leading tool – but all too often organizations are a last-minute thought in tool providers’ pricing options. Because of their size, Organizations aren’t usually privy to any offers – and the pricing model of SaaS solutions often scales directly with the number of logs being ingested. This places the security of a business in direct opposition to its budget, and forces analysts to choose between the budget and a full-visibility tool.
Stellar Cyber offers all of its next-gen SIEM capabilities within a single license: no hidden fees, or unwelcome upgrades. This flattens out the license structure and makes budgeting far easier. License cost remains lower for organzaitons thanks to consumption-based pricing, but this can be based on either asset quantity, or data volume, for maximal cost-benefit ratio.
Finally, it’s important that your team know how to unlock the full potential of the tools they use. This is the ethos behind our 4-week enablement program: at no extra cost, tool deployment is significantly expedited, and your team provided a full education on the tool’s features and best practices.
Explore Stellar Cyber Today
Over the years, SIEM tools have gained a reputation of being slow, annoying, and low-fidelity. Stellar re-assesses the ways that device, server, and endpoint data can be implemented into small and medium businesses: in its place is a single, cohesive platform that supports real-time action. Have a look for yourself and request a guided demo today.
